Immerse Yourself in the World of Brave

The Brave Storybook Deluxe app ($6.99 on iTunes) is a sort of picture book and activity book with multimedia bits. Now, I’ll admit that I’m starting to get tired of interactive story books — I’d rather just have a nice picture book to read to my kids — so I haven’t been paying as much attention lately to this sort of app. It has two expected modes: Follow Along, which reads the story and moves through the book for you, so you just watch it more like a movie; and Read and Explore, which allows you to advance yourself forward and backward, plus tap the little interactive elements to activate animations and mini-games. The “Play” mode just skips ahead to the activities: an arrow-shooting game, six coloring pages, and six jigsaw puzzles.

Screenshots: a picture from the storybook, the Merida's Challenge archery game, a coloring page, and a puzzle.

The picture book has a side-scrolling interface that has finally (at least somewhat) been freed from the idea of “turning pages.” Instead, you get a panel of text on the left with an image on the right — as you swipe across the screen and the text moves off the left side of the screen, the image on the right expands. It’s hard to explain without seeing it in action, but it’s not simply scrolling left. If you have the narration on, you can pull ahead to the picture and continue to hear the narration reading until you move right to the next section of text. In some cases, the picture (once fully expanded) plays a clip from the movie; in others you get some bits of interactivity (tap here and something happens). Some of the pictures have a hidden arrow which is related to the Merida’s Challenge archery game. Also, on some pages at the bottom of the text there’s an icon which will send you to one of the activities — a coloring page, or a puzzle, or the archery game.

The archery game is actually kind of fun, though simple. Merida rides her horse through the forest, and various targets appear on the trees or swinging from ropes. You have a limited number of arrows, and fire by tapping on the targets. It’s a little tricky, though, as it requires some compensating for her movement and the angle of approach. Hit a bull’s eye or a moving target and you get more arrows. The arrows you collect from the picture book also show up here as special arrows that can be fired. The coloring pages are fairly straightforward. The puzzles aren’t great — you can only pick from the five pieces currently showing, and they have to be dragged directly from the sidebar onto the correct spot: no moving them around on the screen to see where they go. (But also there’s a faded image of the picture on the background so you just match them up anyway.)

Overall: If you like interactive picture books, this has some fun activities included and I do like the page-swiping interface. The narration by Nolan North and voices from the movie are well-done; but if you don’t like those you can also record your own voice reading the story and play that back instead. The puzzles are pretty lame. It’s cheap for a picture book, but still seems a bit pricey as an app.